The Savage Detectives (35 page)

Let's take a closer look at this new horde of poets, of which I'm a part, agewise at least. The great majority are students. A large percentage published their first poems in magazines associated with the university or the Ministry of Education, and their first books with university-affiliated publishing houses. A large percentage have also mastered (in a manner of speaking) a second language in addition to Spanish-usually English, or to a lesser extent French-and translate poets writing in those languages, nor is there any shortage of fledgling translators from the Italian, the Portuguese, or the German. Some combine work as amateur editors with their poetic endeavors, which in turn leads to the proliferation of various often valuable projects of an editorial nature. There are probably more young poets in Mexico now than there've ever been. Does this mean that poets under thirty today, say, are better than those who occupied that age bracket in the sixties? May we conceivably discover the equals of Becerra, José Emilio Pacheco, or Homero Aridjis among some of our most rabidly contemporary poets? That remains to be seen.

And yet Ismael Humberto Zarco's project strikes me as perfect. It was about time to bring out an anthology of young Mexican poets with the same high standards as Monsiváis's
La poesía mexicana del siglo XX
, memorable in so many ways! Or like
Poesía en movimiento
, the exemplary and paradigmatic work undertaken by Octavio Paz, Alí Chumacero, José Emilio Pacheco, and Homero Aridjis. I must admit that in a certain sense I felt flattered when Ismael Humberto Zarco called me at home and said: Luis Sebastián, I need your advice. Of course, advice or not, I knew for a fact that I was already included in the anthology, as a matter of course, you might say (the only thing I didn't know was how many of my poems would be selected), as were my friends, so my visit chez Zarco was initially only in an advisory capacity, in the event that some detail had escaped Zarco, meaning in this particular case some magazine, some publication from the provinces, a name or two that the totalizing zeal of the Zarconian endeavor couldn't permit itself the luxury of overlooking.

But in the scant three days between Ismael Humberto's call and my visit, I happened to learn the number of poets the anthologist planned to include, an excessive number no matter how you looked at it, democratic but hardly realistic, remarkable as an experiment but mediocre as a crucible of poetry. And the devil tempted me, putting ideas in my head during the days between Zarco's call and our meeting, as if the wait (but what wait, my God?) were the Desert and my visit the instant when one opens one's eyes and sees one's Savior. And for those three days I was tortured by doubts. Or Doubts. But it was a torture, this I saw clearly, that brought satisfaction as well as suffering and doubt (or Doubt), as if the flames were a simultaneous source of pain and pleasure.

My idea, or my temptation, was this: to suggest to Zarco that he include Luscious Skin in the anthology. The numbers were in my favor, but everything else was against me. The rashness of this plan, I admit, at first seemed completely insane. I was literally scaring myself. Then it seemed completely pathetic. And later, when I was finally able to get a little distance from it and judge it more coolly (though only in a manner of speaking, of course), it struck me as noble and sad, and I seriously feared for my mental well-being. I did, at least, have the tact or cunning not to announce my plan to the principal interested party, in other words Luscious Skin, whom I saw three times a month, or twice a month, or sometimes only once or not at all, since his absences tended to be long and his appearances unexpected. Our relationship, from the time of our second and transcendental encounter at Emilito Laguna's studio, had followed an irregular course, occasionally in the ascendant (especially as far as I was concerned), and occasionally nonexistent.

We usually saw each other at an empty apartment that my family owned in Nápoles, although the way we met was much more complicated. Luscious Skin would call me at my parents' house and since I was almost never home he would leave a message, calling himself Estéfano. The name, I swear, was not something I suggested. According to him it was an homage to Stéphane Mallarmé, an author he had only heard of (like almost everything, incidentally) but whom he thought of as one of my tutelary spirits, by who knows what kind of strange mental association. Essentially, the name under which he left his messages was a kind of tribute to what he believed I held most dear. In other words, the false name concealed an attraction, a desire, a real need (I don't dare call it love) for me or of me, which, as the months went by and after endless contemplation, I realized filled me with rejoicing.

After he left his messages we would meet at the Glorieta de Insurgentes, at the entrance to a macrobiotic store. Then we would lose ourselves in the city, in coffee shops and bars to the north, near La Villa, where I didn't know anyone and where Luscious Skin had no qualms about introducing me to friends of his, male and female, who would show up in the most unexpected places and whose looks spoke more of a penitentiary Mexico than of otherness, although otherness, as I tried to explain to him, could take many forms. (Like the Holy Spirit, said Luscious Skin, that noble savage.) When night came, we took shelter like two pilgrims in cheap rooms or the lowliest hotels, though there was a certain splendor to them (at the risk of waxing romantic, I'd even say a certain
hope
), places in La Bondojito or on the edges of Talismán. Our relationship was spectral. I don't want to talk about love, and I'm reluctant to talk about desire. We had only a few things in common: some films, some folkloric figurines, the way he liked to tell tales of desperation, the way I liked to listen to them.

Sometimes, inevitably, he would give me one of the magazines published by the visceral realists. I never saw a poem of his in any of them. In fact, when it occurred to me to talk to Zarco about his poetry I had only two poems by Luscious Skin, both of them unpublished. One was a bad imitation of a bad poem by Ginsberg. The other was a prose poem that Torri wouldn't have disapproved of, a strange poem, in which he talked vaguely about hotels and fights. I imagined it was inspired by me.

The night before my meeting with Zarco I could hardly sleep. I felt like a Mexican Juliet, trapped in a sordid struggle between Montagues and Capulets. My relationship with Luscious Skin was secret, at least to the extent that the situation was under my control. By this I don't mean that no one in my circle of friends knew about my homosexuality, which I kept quiet but didn't hide. What they didn't know was that I was involved with a visceral realist (though Luscious Skin was hardly your typical visceral realist). How would Albertito Moore take the news that I was recommending Luscious Skin for the anthology? What would Pepín Morado say? Would Adolfito Olmo think I'd gone crazy? And Ismael Humberto himself, so cold, so sarcastic, so apparently
above it all
, would he not see my suggestion as a betrayal?

So when I went to visit Ismael Humberto Zarco and showed him those two poems, which I came bearing like two precious objects, I was inwardly prepared to be asked all kinds of difficult questions. And so I was, since Ismael Humberto is no fool and he realized immediately that my protégé was from the wrong side of the fence, as they say. Luckily (Ismael Humberto is no fool, but he isn't God either), he didn't connect him to the visceral realists.

I fought hard for Luscious Skin's prose poem. I argued that since the anthology could hardly be called selective in terms of the number of poets published, it should make no difference to him whether we included something my friend had written. The anthologist was unyielding. He planned to publish more than two hundred young poets, most represented by a single poem, but not Luscious Skin.

At one point in our discussion he asked me the name of my protégé. I don't know his name, I said, exhausted and ashamed.

When I saw Luscious Skin again, in a moment of weakness I told him about my failed efforts to get one of his poems into Zarco's forthcoming book. In the way he looked at me, I saw something like gratitude. Then he asked me whether Pancho and Moctezuma Rodríguez were included in Ismael Humberto's anthology. No, I said, I don't think so. What about Jacinto Requena and Rafael Barrios? They're not either, I said. María and Angélica Font? No. Ernesto San Epifanio? I shook my head, although actually I didn't know, the name didn't sound familiar. And what about Ulises Lima? I looked steadily into his dark eyes and said no. Then it's better if I'm not in it either, he said.

Angélica Font, Calle Colima, Colonia Condesa, Mexico City DF, April 1979
. At the end of 1977 Ernesto San Epifanio was admitted to the hospital to have a hole drilled in his skull so that he could be operated on for a brain aneurysm. A week later, they had to go back in because apparently they'd left something inside his head. The doctors had very little hope for this second operation. If they didn't operate he would die, and if they did operate he would die anyway, although his odds were slightly better. That was my understanding of it and I was the only person who was with him the entire time. Me and his mother, although somehow his mother doesn't count because her daily visits to the hospital turned her into the invisible woman: whenever she was there she was so quiet that even though she really did come into the room, even though she sat beside the bed, she never seemed to cross the threshold, or ever quite finish crossing the threshold, this tiny figure framed by the white opening of the doorway.

My sister María came a few times too. And Juanito Dávila, alias El Johnny, Ernesto's last love. The rest were brothers and sisters, aunts, people I didn't know, connected to my friend only by the most unlikely family ties.

No writers came, or poets, or ex-lovers.

The second operation lasted more than five hours. I fell asleep in the waiting room and dreamed of Laura Damián. Laura had come looking for Ernesto and then the two of us went for a walk in a eucalyptus forest. I don't know whether there really is such a thing, because I've never been in a eucalyptus forest, but the one in my dream was horrible. The leaves were silver and when they brushed my arm they left a dark, sticky mark. The ground was soft, like the needle-carpeted ground in pine forests, although the forest in my dream was a eucalyptus forest. The trunks of all the trees, without exception, were rotten and their stink was unbearable.

When I woke up in the waiting room there was no one there and I started to cry. How could it be that Ernesto San Epifanio was dying alone in a hospital in Mexico City? How could it be that I was the only person there, waiting for someone to tell me whether he had died or survived a terrible operation? When I was done crying I think I fell asleep again. When I woke up Ernesto's mother was beside me murmuring something I couldn't understand. It took me a while to realize that she was just praying. Then a nurse came in and said that everything had gone well. The operation was a success, she explained.

A few days later Ernesto was discharged and went home. I had never been to his house before. We always saw each other at my house or at other friends' houses. But from then on I began to visit him at home.

The first few days he didn't even talk. He looked around and blinked but didn't talk. He didn't seem to hear anything either. And yet the doctor had recommended that we talk to him, that we treat him as if nothing had happened. So I did. The first day I looked in his bookcase for a book I knew for sure that he liked and I started to read it out loud. It was Valéry's
Cemetery by the Sea
, and he didn't show the slightest sign that he recognized it. I read it and he looked at the ceiling or the walls or my face, and his real self wasn't there. Then I read him a collection of poems by Salvador Novo and the same thing happened. His mother came into the room and touched my shoulder. Don't wear yourself out, miss, she said.

Little by little, however, he began to distinguish sounds, bodies. One afternoon he recognized me. Angélica, he said, and he smiled. I had never seen such a horrible, pathetic, crooked smile. I started to cry. But he didn't seem to notice that I was crying and kept smiling. He looked like a corpse. The trephination scars weren't hidden by his hair yet, which was maddeningly slow to grow back.

A little later he started to talk. He had a very high-pitched, thin little voice, like a flute. Gradually it grew stronger, but no less shrill. In any case, it wasn't Ernesto's voice, that I was sure of. It was like the voice of a feebleminded adolescent, an ignorant adolescent on his deathbed. His vocabulary was limited. He had a hard time coming up with the words for some things.

One afternoon I got to his house and his mother let me in and then led me to her room, in such a state of agitation that at first I thought my friend must have taken a turn for the worse. But it was a motherly flurry of happiness. He's cured, she told me. I didn't understand what she meant. I thought she was talking about Ernesto's voice or saying that Ernesto's mind had gotten sharper. How is he cured? I said, trying to get her to let go of my arms. It took her a while to say what she meant, but in the end she had to come out with it. Ernesto isn't a fairy anymore, miss, she said. Ernesto isn't what? I said. At that moment his father came into the room, and after asking us what we were doing in there, he declared that his son had finally been cured of his homosexuality. He didn't say it in those exact words, and I didn't want to answer or ask any more questions, so I got out of that horrible room as quickly as I could. Still, before I went into Ernesto's room, I heard his mother say: every cloud has a silver lining.

Of course, Ernesto was still a homosexual even though sometimes he didn't remember very well what that meant. Sexuality, for him, had become something remote, something he knew was pleasurable and exciting, but remote. One day Juanito Dávila called me to say that he was going north, to work, and that I should tell Ernesto goodbye for him because he didn't have the heart. From then on there were no more lovers in Ernesto's life. His voice changed a little, but not enough: he didn't speak, he wailed or moaned, and when he did, everyone except for his mother and me-his father and the neighbors paying their endless obligatory visits-would flee, which was ultimately a relief, so much so that once I thought Ernesto was wailing on purpose to drive away all that terrible politeness.